The Black Lives Matter protests that continued several months after Michael Brown was shot and killed by a Ferguson, Mo., police officer prompted Allen "Lance" Scarsella to fire off an angry text message to a friend.
"Someone needs to go down there and make all those dumb [racial slur] afraid to leave the safety of their own houses," he wrote in March 2015.
That's among the newly released text messages, photos and videos filed as exhibits in Scarsella's trial, which resulted in a jury convicting him earlier in February on 12 counts of felony first-degree assault and riot for shooting five Black Lives Matter protesters on Nov., 23, 2015. He is scheduled to be sentenced on March 10. Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman said he will seek the maximum sentence of nearly 20 years in prison, although he noted that 12 to 17 years would be more likely.
Scarsella and three friends said they went to north Minneapolis' Fourth Police Precinct that night to livestream an ongoing protest of the death of Jamar Clark, who had been shot and killed a few days earlier during a scuffle with police.
Texts and photos taken from Scarsella's cellphone and computer, many of which were not presented at trial, show a deeply racist man who talked about being part of a "reserve militia." He took selfies with his gun in his waistband, wrote frequently about shooting blacks and was passionate about the gun he would eventually use to shoot protesters.
In a follow-up text to the one about Brown and Ferguson, Scarsella referred to blacks as "uneducated monkeys" and that he wanted to make black parents huddle with their children in their homes, "hoping and praying that I pass them by without killing every firstborn black in the neighborhood."
In another text message not presented at the trial he wrote, "I've come to the conclusion that black people should be mandated to have a permit in order to reproduce." On his computer, Scarsella had photos of swastikas, Hitler, and an image that read "Hitler did nothing wrong."
Though the jury didn't see that during trial, they did have access to those exhibits while they deliberated for about eight hours before finding Scarsella guilty.
